The Dropbox desktop application will no longer be supported for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 on October 22nd

No problem Jay. There are plenty of free alternatives out there that do the same thing as Dropbox and more as well as offer greater storage space, so Dropbox shooting themselves in the foot is entirely your choice. I will just correct some of the misconceptions you're feeding though. I strongly suspect the 'additional features' to which you refer are actually better and more varied ways of data scraping your users, since that's always been what Windows 10 has been about, which of course is why it's always been free, whereas people had to pay for W7. If the product is 'free', then you are the product that's being sold is the adage.

'Security' has always been the default way to scaremonger users into 'upgrading' to more invasive malware ridden systems their purveyors want, to exploit user behaviour data to resell. The actual truth is the opposite. Windows 7 is by far and away the most secure version of Windows now there has ever been, by simple virtue of the fact that hackers no longer target it. They don't target it because as of June 2024, it's only used on 2.95% of all computers worldwide. XP is even better because it's market share is only 0.39% making it even more popular still than Windows 8 at 0.36%. I gave up bothering to even have an antivirus program installed many years ago. Simply don't need one anymore on Windows 7.

A perfectly valid analogy is a three pedal manual car. These days you could leave a 3 pedal manual car in the street with the keys in it, completely unlocked and it still wouldn't be stolen. Why? Because no car thieves these days have the faintest idea how to even drive a three pedal manual, so they literally couldn't drive it away even if they wanted to!

Crap excuses about security and added features are nothing but Trojan Horses, pure and simple. I'm sure you'll be able to scare a great many users into pointlessly upgrading and giving themselves and their data over to Microsoft to own them. I will simply dump Dropbox and use one of your many other competitors instead.

I have Windows 7 on my home desktop and I like it and do not wish to upgrade. Firstly, this desktop probably does not have sufficient resources for Windows 11, but primarily, I have a laptop with Windows 11 (and previously with Windows 10) and I do not like it restarting on me without my permission. I prefer to choose when I update anything, and unless you're fixing bugs or improving performance, I am probably not interested in your new features, especially if they use up more resources, and I have found that that is what most updates are.

Dropbox has proved a very useful way to carry around your important documents (in spite of Windows always wanting to put them elsewhere).

I see no valid reason why the existing software on Windows 7 should not continue to work, or why you cannot make simple light versions for Windows 7 with the features we have now and that this cannot continue to be supported, because I am sure there are many like me who do not like their computers being controlled by Microsoft and other software manufacturers, and would like to be able to choose what we run on our own computers.

Bleck. Tuning into this thread for the eventual workaround chat.

There should be a number of 3rd party multi-cloud apps that can use dropbox as a backend. None of them integrate with windows as well as dropbox does, but we'll have to find out out the pros and cons eventually now. I've used RaiDrive a bit, since Google Drive stopped caring about win7, and it works decently, though not perfectly. Note that google drive never worked particularly well compared to dropbox, so the challenges and expectations are higher for the dropbox integrations. Note: while companies often like to charge subscriptions for no apparent reason (this would seemingly include RaiDrive), cloud apps are often requiring assistance from the 3rd party app vendor's servers to work around shoddy design in the cloud backends (and this is often intentionally shoddy design, to frustrate bad actors and people like us, none of whom they care about).

I do expect there to be a period of time where it's relatively easy to interfere with dropbox so that it thinks it's running on win10 even when it's not, so they can't shut us off on the server. But eventually they will use some OS services which are not so easy to fake, and it's the integration with OS (filesystem and shell) services that are a principal part of dropbox's value so it's not so easy to just slice out either.

Doubtful, because the very nature of the software's purpose is that it connects to the internet and 'phone's home' all the time in order to do the very thing the tin it comes in says it can do. This means it is constantly checking for and updating itself without user control. There used to be a stripped out version called Dropbox portable, which could even run from USB on computers that were locked down from installing apps like work computers, but Dropbox put an end to that when they decided they would remove the option of preventing updates and took away all user control altogether.

Just google "how do I prevent Dropbox from updating" and you'll see this is a VERY common and wanted question. The answer unfortunately is you can't - at least not without breaking the application entirely such that it no longer works. In this respect, it's the same as Windows 10/11 itself. You can strip all the spyware and telemetry out of Windows 7 relatively easily and make a new installer without all the spyware/bloatware crap, and it works brilliantly - far better in fact than it ever did officially from Microsoft, but you can't do the same thing with Windows 10/11. The telemetry/spyware/data scraping tools are so intrinsic and embedded so deeply within the operating structure of Windows 10/11, that removing them breaks the OS to such an extent that it no longer works as an OS. Exactly the same is true of Dropbox now unfortunately. These are both advertising tools designed to harvest your data and sell it to advertisers ultimately to make money.

Windows 10/11's primary purpose is a data scraping tool for Microsoft. On the back of that basic functionality is an operating system for your MSI/Gigabyte/ASUS whatever MoBo provided as the useful part you need to run your computer as the incentive for installing it, but never forget that the primary purpose and the main reason for the software existing in the first place is to scrape the user's data and feed it back to Microsoft.

As of today, right now (since I just checked), the sum total market share of Windows versions 7 + 8 + 8.1 is only 3.71%. That's how many computers in the world are running those OSes. The simply truth is that Dropbox have made a commercial decision to trash 3.71% of their customers they've determined they can live without and don't need. They can see the numbers for themselves and that's a decision they've made. 3.71% is not a lot and they can obviously survive with a loss of 3.71% of their customer base, so that's what they've decided to do. No amount of pleading or hand wringing will change that. Just switch to their competitors instead. A quick look reveals there are a lot of them.

Apparently I am NOT the Lone Ranger who intends to continue running Win 7 despite Dropbox's unfortunate decision to discontinue support soon. It makes no sense to let "the tail wag the dog" by upgrading (?) away from Win 7 to continue using Dropbox. Those folks could help the community by publishing a list of free alternatives that will continue to be supported for Win 7 users who refuse to switch OSes for only one app. Do y'all hear me OK ??

Very Bewildered Bob

Hi Clive48, it is possible that you have the Dropbox desktop application running in compatibility mode on Windows 10?

We have the same issue using Windows Server 2019. Dropbox cannot be started anymore.. What can we do!? 

I haven't received that notification, and I just made a change to a file on my Windows 7 machine and checked that my Windows 11 laptop picked it up, which it did.

Sync is not free for the amount of storage space I need, but I'm happy to pay $8 a month or whatever to know my storage is safe.

When the time comes I need to move I will certainly consider it. 

I recently had an issue of Firefox not giving me any sound now on Windows 7. For what is supposed to be a "frozen" version, they insist on keep changing these things, including Spotify teling me my operating system is out of date. These companies trying to control what I do on my home computer And the reason I like Windows 7 is it never crashes and I don't get restarts when I didn't ask for them.